How Equitable Confronted Its Inertia After 160 Years in Business

BRIAN KENNY: Welcome to Cold Call, the podcast where we dive deep into the stories behind groundbreaking Harvard Business School case studies. It’s early 2025 and inside Equitable Holdings, CEO Mark Pearson is asking a simple but profound question: is 80% enough? Over the past three years, the company has undergone a sweeping transformation and launched a bold experiment to reinvent how a 160-year-old financial institution collaborates, innovates, and leads. This New Way of Working is designed to speed up decision-making, empower teams, and ignite a new culture of agility. But not everyone is on board. Some divisions thrive under the new model while others cling to old habits.

As Pearson and his leadership team look ahead, they face a defining choice whether to push for total adoption or allow flexibility at the edges. This case challenges us to consider what true cultural change looks like and what it takes to make it last. Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor Das Narayandas and guests Mark Pearson and Jeff Hurd to discuss the case, “New WOW at Equitable, A New Way of Working.”

I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR podcast network.

Das Narayandas’ research focuses on business-to-business marketing and management of client relationships and professional service firms. Das, it’s been a while since we’ve had you on Cold Call. Welcome back.

DAS NARAYANDAS: Thank you.

BRIAN KENNY: It’s great to have you here. We’re really excited to have two guests in the studio today. In addition to Das, we’ve got Mark Pearson, he’s the president and CEO of Equitable Holdings. He’s joined today by Jeff Hurd, Chief Operating Officer. Both of you have lived the case so thank you for being here to talk about it with us.

JEFF HURD: We’re really happy to be here.

MARK PEARSON: Thank you very much, Brian.

BRIAN KENNY: It’s been a busy day for you, right? You came in from the classroom and you’re coming in here, so you’ve got some fresh insights as to the discussion that took place there. I think a lot of people will be able to relate to the central themes of this case because every organization is trying to figure out how to get more agile, how to be more innovative, particularly in the age of AI, where these things are coming at us fast and we’ve got to figure out how to grapple with it. And as we all know, change is hard. So, we’re going to talk about that.

Das, I’m going to start with you. Let’s just dive right in. I’m wondering what initially drew you to the case and how this story reflects larger questions about how organizations pursue cultural change, particularly in highly regulated industries, which the Equitable is. We’ll talk a little bit about their business in a moment, but why’d you write the case?

DAS NARAYANDAS: Like you said, Brian, change is hard, change is ugly, and we live in a world where change is something that has to happen all the time. So, how does one go about doing it? The reason I wrote this case is I’ve been thinking about looking at a series of firms in different industries that are trying to overcome inertia and break down barriers to remain relevant.

The metaphor I used in class today when I was teaching this case was my visit to my physician earlier this summer, and he told me that my metabolism was slowing down. I took that as a comment about my aging, but then I realized when I ChatGPT’d after the meeting about metabolism, what I found out was metabolism in human body slows down when the muscle mass decreases, which is part of aging. What my physician was telling me was, Das, if you want to stay alive, go get yourself fit by building some muscle mass. I think that’s really what organizations need to do too. You need to build the muscle to remain relevant. This case that I’ve written is trying to capture how Mark and Jeff as leaders of Equitable took 160-year-old organization and have truly made it relevant in today’s world by making it a five-year-old. They brought in new muscle, and they made existing muscle better. That is the whole idea of change management, and that’s why I wrote this case.

BRIAN KENNY: Five-year-olds can be difficult to manage, though; we know that. It’s a great metaphor.

DAS NARAYANDAS: Let’s say that what they did was build a disciplined five-year-old, if there is one.

BRIAN KENNY: Well, I’ve never met one of those before. Great. Mark, I’m going to turn to you then and ask you, I thought the metabolism thing was actually a really interesting metaphor for what you were doing here. I’m wondering if you take us back to 2018, which was the IPO when the case first kicks off, what did you observe that convinced you that Equitable needed to rethink how it worked?

MARK PEARSON: Well, one of the things with any change management is having a catalyst to change. The IPO really came to us when AXA, our parent at that time, decided that it was going to exit the U.S. market and in turn, we were going to spin off on our own. We were incredibly excited about that. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be the architect of a business rather than somebody who drove the car that somebody else had designed. So very, very excited at that. At the same time, we knew that this organization, 160-year-old, was very high integrity business, a nice business, but a very, very sleepy business. It just wasn’t fit for purpose as a listed company. We knew that we had to do three things really. Firstly, we had to change our risk philosophy, our risk profile, because our balance sheet was a different size to AXA’s.

Secondly, I had to bring in people who had operated in that listed entity world, and Jeff was the first person we hired there. And then thirdly, the way we work the culture, if you like, inside the organization, we had to speed it up. We had to be much more innovative because at the same time as this IPO, we saw those forces you were talking about in the introduction to the podcast, we saw technology coming in, we saw new competitors coming in. We saw new sophisticated ways of investing. So, the convergence of these two really was what made us very determined that we had to change the metabolism to take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Jeff, you kind of lived it. You were one of the people who was helping to drive this change within the firm. We talk a lot at Harvard Business School about design thinking and the importance of agility. Those are abstract concepts though. I think one of the things that’s difficult is how you drive that home in a practical way so people understand what does it take to actually do this in a way that’s going to help our business? How were you able to translate those ideas to the people within the firm?

JEFF HURD: We knew we had to be better, faster, smarter, cheaper, and I think the whole organization recognized that. We had great confidence because of the studying that we had done, the visiting of other companies that these sort of time-tested methodologies were sound, and they needed to be adapted for Equitable; and maybe to use Das’s muscle analogy, we knew that to build muscle, we just had to get going.

This couldn’t stay on a piece of paper and not be implemented. So, we got going and we took our first unit in. We took that unit all the way down to the studs, started talking to them about what their mission is. They create their own mission. We walked them through how to create OKRs, which are a really, really hard thing to do. We help them organize into agile teams and to start to operate in those teams. By doing, we built a real flywheel and momentum, and people could touch and feel and experience what we had put out on a piece of paper.

BRIAN KENNY: By the way, I should have asked at the outset, Mark, maybe you can tell us just quickly the profile of Equitable, how many employees you have and the main lines of business.

MARK PEARSON: Yeah, sure. Equitable, 163 years old, now quoted on New York Stock Exchange, about 15 billion market cap. We serve about five and a half million clients across three main lines of business. Retirement business, wealth management, and asset management is what we do. In total across our two operating companies, we manage about a trillion of clients’ money.

BRIAN KENNY: Das, you studied a lot of different firms and different industries. I’m wondering what made this experiment interesting. I’m thinking particularly about the fact that the industry is highly regulated, so being agile is great, being reckless is not, managing your risk profile, Mark, as you said before, why did you think this was an interesting one to focus on in particular?

DAS NARAYANDAS: I think it goes back to the question you asked earlier, Brian, when you asked Jeff, “Tell us how you got it done.” This is something that we’ve been discussing in the School for a decade now: knowing in itself is not enough. Doing and being is when and how things get crystal clear. This was an example where the concepts that we have heard of for a long time were brought together by a bunch of people. They have no issues by saying that we’ve imported ideas that others had, but what they did, which is their very own, was the mixing. To me, that was a great example that I wanted to bring to the executives that I’m teaching now who are running their own businesses, who are in a fundamental situation of fright or flight when they should actually be thinking of fight. I want to teach this case to give them a better understanding of how to stand their ground and fight, and remain competitive in a world where new competitors are showing up all the time.

BRIAN KENNY: Mark, I think there might’ve been some marketing people involved. I say that as a marketing person because you packaged this up inside the firm, you had a sort of a brand going around this, which is New Way of Working. The acronym is N-W-O-W. Do you actually say “en-WOW?”

MARK PEARSON: Yes, we do.

BRIAN KENNY: Awesome. Maybe you can talk a little bit about NWOW, what comprised it. There were five pillars that are mentioned in the case. If you can briefly describe what those are and how you packaged this in a way that people across the firm could begin to understand what it was you were trying to do.

MARK PEARSON: Thanks, Brian. It’s a package of, as Das said, tried and tested methodologies that worked for us. So, starts off with objectives and key results. I mean, we were very influenced by John Doerr’s book Measure What Matters. Secondly, adaptive leadership. Really empowering our leaders to make the decisions that they need to make in our best place to make. So really an empowerment message in there. Agile working, we had within our IT department, we saw how that worked and so we rolled it out as fast as we could. Then it was clear to us that we needed to have a segment that was dealing with redesign because over the 160 years of the existence of the company, the structures inside of the company look a little bit like a coral reef, they’re not really designed or smooth. Then we had one based around skills as well and really flattened the organization out so that instead of having 26 layers of job title, we went right down to five. So, they were the five main pillars.

BRIAN KENNY: That’s a huge challenge in any organization. Even here at Harvard Business School, we’ve got silos, and it’s always difficult to figure out a way to pull people out of the silos and think about being one team. I think clearly you’ve encountered this as well. Jeff, I’m going to come back to you and ask you what the thinking was behind the way that you designed things and how you were able to break down some of the silos and get people to come up and be part of a bigger community.

JEFF HURD: It goes back to how we implemented these with each of the units that I touched on a little bit before, but we would have a boot camp, and we’d have a group of leaders together in a particular part of the organization. And they had this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to completely redesign their organization, to create new organizational units, to open up a bunch of leadership positions for other people in their organization or elsewhere in the organization. We actually did a thing called the opportunity fairs where the leader of the group would stand up in front of the entire Equitable organization, talk about their mission, talk about why this is the place in Equitable that you want to work, and talk about these actual big leadership job openings. They were open to anybody in the company. The people who acted early in effect got first draft pick. And that built a real flywheel of people now raising their hands saying, “I want to be next, I want to be next.”

That just created excitement in the organization, allowed us to shuffle the leadership, allowed us to find gems. I know Mark and I would go to the readouts and people would be talking about their OKRs or their mission, and we’d look at each other and say, “Who is that person?” Because we would’ve never discovered them in the past, and there they were and said, This person needs a leadership role. So, it really broke a lot of the coral reef that Mark talked about before.

BRIAN KENNY: You’re making it sound easy though, and I’m sure it wasn’t easy. I’m sure there was a fair amount of skepticism as you’ll find in any organization. What was the initial reaction that you were getting from people? Was there pushback and how’d you deal with that?

MARK PEARSON: Absolutely. There’s skepticism on any change program. One of the keys we found was to find the influential skeptics and really turn them. Really takes a lot of work. You have to sit down, you have to explain why you’re doing this. You have to measure the changes that you are making. But once some of those skeptics turn, they become your best ambassadors and they really, really carry a lot of the other people. There’s no doubt although, Brian, that New Ways of Working isn’t for everybody.

The level of accountability in there, standing up every two weeks to say, “What have you done in the last sprint? How are you contributing?” May not be for everybody. So clearly, we did lose some people who weren’t attuned to that way of working. To Jeff’s point earlier, it was very interesting to watch. There became a tipping point where the skeptics then turn, there is some momentum. We see engagement going up, we see results going back. Then other departments were, when is it my turn? We reached a tipping point after a while where you could see people queuing up to get the program and be in the boot camp.

BRIAN KENNY: Das, you probably looked at similar situations in a lot of different places. I’m wondering, as you saw as an outsider looking at what Equitable was doing, how important was it to have this balance of top-down versus bottom-up? Giving people some autonomy and basically some skin in the game, I guess is one way to look at it.

DAS NARAYANDAS: Change only works when it’s both ways, top-down and bottom-up. The key to successful change is figuring out when it should be top-down and when it should be bottom-up. I wrote this case actually to have that very discussion in class, Brian. It’s not one or the other. There are things that leaders need to mandate, and there are things where you need to let people come along on their own with some encouragement, figuring out that magic mix. At the end of the day, this case is about helping managers and leaders figure out how to mix the right concoction. The ingredients are there; everyone has access to it. It’s compounding it together into something that’s a powerful medication that changes the metabolism of organizations. That’s what this case is about.

I just want to add here, the B case that goes with this case actually is the playbook. It is an interactive PDF or PowerPoint that people can use to figure out what those five pillars that you mentioned are, how it works, what the process is, how you get it done. Now, my gut and Kerry Herman, who I wrote this case with, we were discussing and when we were writing this case, we said, Ah, this company is never going to let us publish the playbook. Because that’s the secret sauce. Who would give up the secret sauce? So, he said, Anyway, let’s ask. No harm done in asking. And lo and behold, when we asked the leadership—Jeff, Mark—they say, Sure, take it. You want the functionality, keep it. Then we looked at each other and said, Why are they giving it? They’re not naive. They’re smart. What we realized was their supreme confidence in how they have done it, that they are happy for others to replicate. I’m not giving away the crown jewels in the case. I’m actually making it more interesting for people to go figure out the case because, what is it that these people do? What is this NWOW that they are so openly discussing that I can learn from and use? That’s what we’re going to be learning from doing this case in class.

BRIAN KENNY: I would imagine that telling people what you did and explaining to them how they could do it isn’t a guarantee that they’re going to be able to pull off what you pulled off. This takes a lot of work, a lot of attention to detail and a lot of bringing the culture along with you. Jeff mentioned that not everybody embraced it. Some people had to be moved out. There’s some cultural damage that happens there. How do you as a leader, Mark, think about making sure the culture doesn’t get irreparably harmed as you do this and you’re trying to bring people forward with you?

MARK PEARSON: It’s a bit of getting the balance right between honoring the past and also making sure that the company is going to be around in the future. It’s especially important for an insurance group like ours where just last year, Brian, we paid out on a policy that was taken out in 1931.

BRIAN KENNY: Oh, my goodness.

MARK PEARSON: We are a long cycle, decades-long business, so we have to honor the past and Equitable has much to do. So, we were… I don’t know, just off the top of my head, we’ve ensured 10 U.S. presidents. We were amongst the first to pay out to servicemen and servicewomen in World War II. We were there through the Depression. A very fine and honorable past, but we have to make sure that we not only survive, but thrive in the future because the promises we’re making today, we will have to pay out on decades to come. I don’t have a problem with honoring the past, but also changing for the future. And the culture really, really did need to change.

It’s interesting, Brian, if you look at the management team now, Jeff and I didn’t set out to do this, but it’s almost exactly one third of people who joined new since NWOW, one third of some of the younger people have been promoted up rapidly through NWOW, and about one third have been throughout the whole journey. So, it’s quite interesting we’ve got that mix, which I think enables us to honor that past and keep the bits of the culture that we want and also change so that we can be competitive and stay around for decades to come.

BRIAN KENNY: You’re talking about the decades-long relationship you have with your customers, which is, we haven’t talked about the customers here. Have you told them what you’re doing? How have they reacted to it if you have? Are they in favor of this or are they, oh, don’t mess with my insurance?

MARK PEARSON: I think the best story we can probably tell is with our teachers’ business. We’re very proud to serve a million educators in the U.S. We’re number one in the K-12.

BRIAN KENNY: My wife thanks you; she’s an educator.

MARK PEARSON: Thank you. You’ll know through your wife, Brian, that COVID time, everything shut on the schools. We had the worksite marketing model where our advisors would go into the school, sit on those little chairs, get a yellow pad out and help the teacher with their retirement planning. That of course, all came to a shuddering halt, and we had to dramatically change how we interacted with them. We had to go from face-to-face to digital, which Jeff and I reckon would’ve taken years and years to do if we’d have sat down and wrote out a project. But the fact that we were able to use NWOW to sit down and say, Look, we need to contact our clients here.

The most important thing for us during COVID was to pay out claims and retirement checks when our clients needed them. If you can’t get that claim or retirement check from an insurance company when a disaster has hit, why do you need an insurance company? It actually came together very, very well there. That would be an example where our clients were informed. I guess, Das in his teaching earlier on was saying, sometimes in change programs you need a little bit of luck. We totally agree with that one. We were a little bit lucky there during COVID that teachers were trying to figure out with their students how to connect. So, we fed into that debate and we were saying, hey, we want to connect with you as well. And they were open to it.

BRIAN KENNY: It’s another where we’ve heard so many silver linings that came out of that horrible situation where businesses—

MARK PEARSON: Accelerators…

BRIAN KENNY: …found new ways to do things and really spur growth. Jeff, I want to come back to you. Most firms I think I can safely say would have hired consultants to do this. They would’ve paid a lot of money to outside firms to come in and help them do it, but you chose to do it differently. I’m wondering why you made that trade-off and what you see as the benefits or drawbacks from doing that.

JEFF HURD: One of the great attributes of this leadership team, I’d say, Brian, is that they’re learning machines. We had benefited so much from reading John Doerr, reading Turn the Ship Around, visiting companies like Spark, which is a telecom company in New Zealand that adopted Agile for Grownups, visiting other companies. We did work with a consulting firm at the beginning and took a lot of knowledge from them. They helped us to figure out how to stand up the organization in the right way. We probably worked with them for about six months. But we knew that if you’re not going to get that eye roll from the organization, it has to be done with your people, you have to own it.

Really, the CEO has to own it and say, “This is ours.” So, we took one of our top talents, Hilary Menard, who used to be Mark’s chief of staff, and we said, You’re in charge of this innovation and design office. You figure out how to implement this. You tell us what resources you need to do that. And you decide whether you need consultants or not. That was a form of adaptive leadership where we didn’t tell her what to do. She decided we needed to make this our own. And she built an outstanding team to implement it.

MARK PEARSON: Brian, I think when you have change programs that are driven by consultants over the years, operating managers have learned that sooner or later the consultants will go and we can get back to normal.

BRIAN KENNY: The book goes on the shelf.

MARK PEARSON: Yeah. I think it is very important if change is going to be enduring that it is yours. Sure, use consultants to train the trainer if you like, and lift your skills up. But many, many managers who maybe don’t want to change will just simply outweigh the consultants.

BRIAN KENNY: Actually, on that point, Das, I want to come back to you for a minute because this all began at a moment of inflection for the firm. The IPO gave them the platform and the burning platform that you described before, Mark. How do you sustain that once the fire is out? Once the burning is gone, and that the firm’s doing well, do people just fall back into a mode where they kind of wait it out a little bit?

DAS NARAYANDAS: Well, that’s what you’ll learn when you discuss the case in class. I will answer your question, but I just want to reflect on something that Mark said earlier. In the spirit of continuous improvement and agile development, when we wrote the current version of the case, we consciously chose not to include a case fact that the current organization is one-third the old, one-third laterals in, and one-third coming up. We thought that that would be a good “aha” to pull out in class. But having taught the case a couple of times today, we are going to put that into the case

Mark and Jeff spent quite some time with the participants talking about what it takes to make this happen. So, yes, what do you do going ahead? is a good question, and I’ll answer that in a moment, but how do you make sure that it works in the short run? What do you do with naysayers? Skeptics can be converted, but there are cynics too. Being cynical is irrational. It’s not easy to convert that. How do you manage that? So, the case, when putting this fact in, I will be able to force students to address this question of, how do you manage those that don’t want to get on board? That’s really the question that we’re going to start with in this case discussion: is 80% good enough, or do you need to get to 100%? And how do you manage it?

I’m now answering your question: What the team has shown and what will be a C case, which you’re going to put together, is the fact that the pillars are evolving. There are existing pillars that are evolving to reflect current times. There are new pillars being added, and that’s how it remains current. That’s how it remains exciting. That’s what makes it effective for people to adopt. Great brands are consistent. They take the core promise, but they make it work in today’s world. The day this team stops innovating New Ways of Working is the day it becomes history. For now, I can tell you they’re very agile in making sure that the latest issues, the externalities in the world, are constantly being reflected in how this system is being deployed.

BRIAN KENNY: I love your answer because you started out by… Our listeners are hearing about new HBS case studies all the time, and part of the reason we do this podcast is to show people how relevant the case studies are to everyday business practice. And you just showed us that you’re innovating on the case even as you go because learning in the classroom and feeding that back into the case. So that’s a really great point.

DAS NARAYANDAS: Thank you.

BRIAN KENNY: Jeff, I wanted to ask you something about what Das just said, which is that you’ve got to keep changing the model to keep it fresh. From your vantage point, how do you know when it’s time to change something up? Are you getting a feedback loop from within the firm?

JEFF HURD: 100%. Maybe I’ll answer that in two ways. One is within each unit they’ve implemented New Ways of Working slightly differently. The core concepts are 100% adoption. We had that conversation in class, but exactly how it’s applied has to be modified a bit with the right mindset for the organization. The service center is different than the sales team is different than the product team. So, we see innovation on NWOW every time we stand up a new organization. And then what we’ve learned recently, we added another pillar called “process redesign,” and Mark talked about this coral reef that builds up after 160 years. We were hearing, because of adaptive leadership, from all sorts of different parts of our organization that this process is broken, this process isn’t working, and they actually knew how to fix it. So, we developed a methodology, or adopted a methodology, tried and true process re-engineering to go in, listened to the folks who are actually doing the process, map it out, apply digital technologies to it, and totally revamp those processes. That’s a new wedge in the NWOW wheel that we’ve added probably about six months ago.

BRIAN KENNY: So, you’ve had some time to see what the results are. I’m wondering, reflecting back, if you can tell us how do you think it’s going? What would you be looking at to call this a success three, four, five years from now?

MARK PEARSON: Looking forward, I think the one thing we can be certain of is the amount of opportunities for change that we will see will not slow down, looking at Gen AI obviously, changes in the workforce. For our business, Brian, the demographics are very, very favorable in terms of the number of Americans reaching a traditional retirement age of 65 is yet to peak. But also, we know, I think that there are some enduring principles as well. I guess looking out the things that don’t change are as important for us as how we work and what doesn’t go. I think we see Equitable as being a trusted partner. We also know that it’s a very competitive market, and we need to be relentless in our innovation, and we need to continue with NWOW to be very, very client focused on that side as well. In our business we need to have a very resilient balance sheet because we need to be around for many, many decades through ups and downs and economy. So, we see NWOW continuing to evolve, and we see a bright future, I think, for our industry and certainly for the company as long as our people remain focused on the client and focused on being a trusted advisor to that client.

BRIAN KENNY: Jeff, let me ask you, as somebody who was helping boots on the ground to lead this effort across the firm, I’m sure some of the folks that are listening to this podcast might be going through a similar kind of transformation at their own firm. Do you have any words of advice, words of caution, anything you would counsel them on?

JEFF HURD: I’d say the one thing I would emphasize is if you’re going to go through a change that’s this big and this transformational, remember that organizations don’t change, people change. So, you really have to show people what’s in it for them: How will I benefit from this change? How will I work better? Mark had a brilliant phrase that he used all the time when we talked to our organization, which is, We’re future proofing you. These are skills that you are learning. We hope you apply them at Equitable. If you pick up and go somewhere else, they’re going to stay with you for the rest of your life. There are great tools to have in your career. Actually, we found, Mark, this was probably most surprising to us, that people were applying these things like OKRs, adaptive leadership, design, thinking to their own lives outside of work.

BRIAN KENNY: Sure. I could see that.

JEFF HURD: So, if you show people what’s in it for them, they actually will change.

BRIAN KENNY: This is a question. I lied. I’m asking each of you another question. As you think about the impact of AI on your business, Mark, because you mentioned it, how are you thinking about bringing people up the learning curve on that, upskilling your own community on what AI means and how they should engage with it?

MARK PEARSON: We have all the tools available for people to actually learn and play in the sandbox, if you like. I think we’ve got something like 400 case studies we’ve looked at. I would say mainly on the productivity side at the moment. I think the next stage for us is to look at ways in which we can get out into the marketplace and make it real for us. So very excited about the opportunities that it will bring, and we are in that sort of learning and productivity improvement stage.

BRIAN KENNY: I think we’re all in that phase and trying to figure out how do we wrap our arms around it. Das, I’ve got one last question, and I’ll give this to you, which is that as you think about culture change at an organization, particularly one of this size and scale, the question that the case brings up, is 80% good enough? How do you think about that? How would you counsel a leader who’s trying to think about should they push hard for that 100% adoption, or should they be a little more flexible in that?

DAS NARAYANDAS: My answer that I gave you earlier is come to class and we will discuss. No, the reason why we have that question in the case is it’s real, but it’s also illusionary. Numbers matter, but numbers don’t finalize things. The idea of asking is 80% good enough is actually asking the question, what is good enough? When you say 100%, 100% of what? Focus not on the numbers, but focus on the effectiveness of what you get done and that will lead you to the right answer. The key here is the orientation of people. As long as you can bring people on board and they give it their best, you are on the right path. The problem is when people who get on board sit the wrong way, row in the wrong direction and don’t listen to you, having all 100% of them sitting in the boat is disastrous. That’s really what we spend 80 minutes debating or 90 minutes debating in this case as to, what does it take to create a winning organization?

BRIAN KENNY: Those are great words to end on. Das, Jeff, Mark, thanks for joining me.

MARK PEARSON: Thank you, Brian. Thank you very much.

BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts: Climate Rising, Coaching Real Leaders, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, and Think Big, Buy Small. Find them wherever you get your podcasts.

If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you. Email us at coldcall@hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us. I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.